Better Than Budgeting for Android: Daily App Pick

Posted By Mark Kaelin in App Picks, Lifestyle, Mobile

BreakingModern — When it comes to the December holiday season, two trains of thought come to mind. There is the pleasant train marked by family, Christmas mornings with young children, joy, peace, love and good will toward all. The other train, though, is one chaotically hurdling through time and space. It is marked by Black Friday, frenzied shopping, stress, time pressure and the balancing (or non-balancing) of budgets.

Our goal is to slow down the second train so you can enjoy the first. The Better Than Budgeting free app will certainly help. This handy app is really an extension of a book of the same title written by Norbert D. Frank. It sets out to teach readers and users a simple but effective way to manage their finances. The app, available for Android on Google Play, Apple iOS, Mac and Windows, helps users put the financial management concepts expressed in the book into practice.

Tracking Where the Money Goes

Budgeting is a life skill that everyone should know how to do, but unfortunately many have never been instructed on just how to do it. An app like Better Than Budgeting aims to help overcome that gap in education. The app itself is straightforward and simple to use, but it will take you some time to set up properly. The good news, however, is that the app has a very thorough help system to guide you through the process.

The home screen of the Better Than Budgeting app is where most of the action is going to take place. You will add your personal financial information such as income, expenses, investments and your budget using the Add Category button.

Under the Repetitions tab you can enter those pesky recurring payments like rent, mortgage loans, car loans, cell phones and utilities. This saves you time and stress, since you don’t have to remember to enter those expenses each and every month.

Once you enter all of your initial information you can then start to enter transactions as they happen. As you enter each new transaction you can see how much you are spending and, even more importantly, that you are not spending beyond your means. In my example, the monthly lottery payments are covering my expenses for the month quite nicely, but holiday shopping is just starting so I need to keep a close eye on it.

The Better Than Budgeting app also includes Tools to help you move your data from your mobile device to your desktop and back again. Synchronizing your financial data to all your devices will prevent any overlooked expenditures, and will keep you from breaking your budget.

The app also has a Chart tab where you can see a visual representation of your spending activity. Seeing your spending habits in charts and graphs will show you at a glance where your hard-earned money is going and provide important insight into your own spending behavior. After all, you cannot change bad habits until you recognize them as bad habits.

You Owe It to Yourself

Successfully managing your finances sets you up with a strong foundation for everything life will throw at you. And it will throw things, of that I am sure. My formal training is as an accountant, and I have seen first-hand how poor financial management skills can create havoc in a person’s life. Do yourself a favor and take control of your finances somehow, someway.

I use Excel to track every financial transaction in my life because I was trained how to do it that way — it’s become second nature to me. But for those of you not trained in the accounting black arts, I think you will be very happy with the simple yet powerful tools offered by the Better Than Budgeting app.

For BMod, I’m Mark W. Kaelin.

All Screenshots: Mark Kaelin

Header/Featured Image: “Budget” by Simon Cunningham via Flickr Creative Commons